ABSTRACT
After he had tried and hung two unrepentant witches in Suffolk in 1662 based on bizarre testimony about children vomiting dozens of pins and ‘a two-penny nail with a broad head’,2 Chief Justice Matthew Hale, of whom it is said ‘there is probably no judge in English history who has been held in more honorable estimation’,3 wrote: ‘Government is the Ordinance of God, as well in the Invisible as the Visible World.’4 This statement implies a similarity between the temporal and eternal orders in which human government is a subset of the divine, and temporal laws replicate the eternal for the purpose of countering the same evil restless in both kingdoms:
1 Paradise Lost, Book II:1041-55. See John Milton, Paradise Lost and other poems: Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, Lycidas. Newly annotated and with a biographical introduction by Edward Le Comte (New York, 1961), pp. 89-90.
